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I didn’t really invent this meme, as Patrick Armstrong once credited me; there were a few disjointed mentions of it there and there from before 2011. That said, I do think I did more than than anyone else to popularize it. Anyhow, the term Putin Derangement Syndrome has finally gone mainstream, with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibi writing about its “arrival” a few days ago (though arguably, it arrived a decade ago).

One way we recognize a mass hysteria movement is that everyone who doesn’t believe is accused of being in on the plot. This has been going on virtually unrestrained in both political and media circles in recent weeks.

The aforementioned Mensch, a noted loon who thinks Putin murdered Andrew Breitbart but has somehow been put front and center by The Times and HBO’s Real Time, has denounced an extraordinary list of Kremlin plants.

She’s tabbed everyone from Jeff Sessions (“a Russian partisan“) to Rudy Giuliani and former Assistant FBI Director James Kallstrom (“agents of influence“) to Glenn Greenwald (“Russian shill“) to ProPublica and Democracy Now! (also “Russian shills“), tothe 15-year-old girl with whom Anthony Weiner sexted (really, she says, a Russian hacker group called “Crackas With Attitudes”) to an unnamed number of FBI agents in the New York field office (“moles“). And that’s just for starters.

Others are doing the same. Eric Boehlert of Media Matters, upon seeing the strange behavior of Republican Intel Committee chair Devin Nunes, asked “what kind of dossier” the Kremlin has on Nunes.

Dem-friendly pollster Matt McDermott wondered why reporters Michael Tracey and Zaid Jilani aren’t on board with the conspiracy stories (they might be “unwitting” agents!) and noted, without irony, that Russian bots mysteriously appear every time he tweets negatively about them.

Think about that last one. Does McDermott think Tracey and Jilani call their handlers at the sight of a scary Matt McDermott tweet and have the FSB send waves of Russian bots at him on command? Or does he think it’s an automated process? What goes through the heads of such people?

I’ve written a few articles on the Russia subject that have been very tame, basically arguing that it might be a good idea to wait for evidence of collusion before those of us in the media jump in the story with both feet. But even I’ve gotten the treatment.

I’ve been “outed” as a possible paid Putin plant by the infamous “PropOrNot” group, which is supposedly dedicated to rooting out Russian “agents of influence.” You might remember PropOrNot as the illustrious research team the Washington Post once relied on for a report that accused 200 alternative websites of being “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season.”

Politicians are getting into the act, too. It was one thing when Rand Paul balked at OKing the expansion of NATO to Montenegro, and John McCain didn’t hesitate to say that “the senator from Kentucky is now working for Vladimir Putin.”

So even people who themselves have been accused of being Russian plants are now accusing people of being Russian plants. As the Russians would say, it’s enough to make your bashka hurt.

The paranoia is matched only by its ignorance and stupidity:

Even the bizarre admission by FBI director (and sudden darling of the same Democrats who hated him months ago) James Comey that he didn’t know anything about Russia’s biggest company didn’t seem to trouble Americans very much. Here’s the key exchange, from a House hearing in which Jackie Speier quizzed Comey:

SPEIER: Now, do we know who Gazprom-Media is? Do you know anything about Gazprom, director?
COMEY: I don’t.
SPEIER: Well, it’s a – it’s an oil company.

(Incidentally, Gazprom – primarily a natural-gas giant – is not really an oil company. So both Comey and Speier got it wrong.)

As Leonid Bershidsky of Bloomberg noted, this exchange was terrifying to Russians. The leader of an investigation into Russian espionage not knowing what Gazprom is would be like an FSB chief not having heard of Exxon-Mobil. It’s bizarre, to say the least.

And it may lead to some very bad things, from entrenching the status quo…

Moreover, even those who detest Trump with every fiber of their being must see the dangerous endgame implicit in this entire line of thinking. If the Democrats succeed in spreading the idea that straying from the DNC-approved candidate – in either the past or the future – is/was an act of “unwitting” cooperation with the evil Putin regime, then the entire idea of legitimate dissent is going to be in trouble.

Imagine it’s four years from now (if indeed that’s when we have our next election). A Democratic candidate stands before the stump, and announces that a consortium of intelligence experts has concluded that Putin is backing the hippie/anti-war/anti-corporate opposition candidate.

… to war.

But if you’re not worried about accusing non-believers of being spies, or pegging legitimate dissent as treason, there’s a third problem that should scare everyone.

But there’s been remarkable unanimity among would-be enemies in the Republican and Democrat camps on this question. Suddenly everyone from Speier to McCain to Kamala Harris to Ben Cardin have decried Russia’s alleged behavior during the election as real or metaphorical acts of war: a “political Pearl Harbor,” as Cardin put it. …

I suppose I will now need to redouble my efforts on pushing the ROG (Russian Occupation Government) meme, which is apparently so all encompassing that an American Tomahawk strike ordered by Putler’s puppet Trump on a military base with Russian advisors is, in fact, a “manufactured Cold War 2.0 which will lead to a peace deal that includes lifting sanctions on Russia” according to the top voted comment on the relevant thread at the /r/politics subreddit.

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Blogroll

This is not so much meant to be comprehensive as to illustrate the themes and individual thinkers whom I follow and am inspired by.

I do not bother including any MSM outlets, since I’m sure they can do just fine without my publicity.

Blogs which I consider to be particularly good and/or prominent are highlighted in bold, and blogs that appear to have gone dormant appear at the end in italics. While I try to keep these things objective, if you include me in your blogroll that does vastly increase the chances that I’ll reciprocate.

1: Economic/political situation continues to deteriorate
It's improving, not deteriorating.
2: Fascists will demand an ever increasing share of power, leading to a breackup with the Oligarchs.
They are marginal.
First, I think Putins team massively overestimated how annoying the Fas...

Only 1 southern state*
It was anglo niggers who tried to expand the dravidian identity many 1000s km north to cover 4 states।।
Languages like Telugu have many many Sanskrit words & identify as the North they are 'Sanskritized' even the Tamil Dravidas were but British missionary work...

Equality of law in unequal world is stupidity।।
Men of higher Varna must be punished more frequently & severely।।
They must also be able to pursue their Dharma though, especially Ksytrias who will rebel until they rule।।

Anglo-Americans are the only monolingual group of people. They boasted how English has conquered the world, how everybody speaks now English. They did not realize what people told them. Everybody speaks English, but they speak other languages too. Many are multilingual as a matter of fact, which ...

Here is my own assessment on why Putin did not invade in 2014:
Snipergate.
I think Putin perceives his path to victory like this:
1: Economic/political situation continues to deteriorate
2: Fascists will demand an ever increasing share of power, leading to a breackup with the Oligarchs.
...

But Prometheus does not break any 'natural bounds' (probably you wanted to say bondage). He steals the fire from the heavens to bring it down to earth to serve even more 'natural bounds'. He didn't help man to free himself from the natural bondage (that's what religion does), but bonded it more '...

Pretty good predictions.
I read in some comment somewhere that Grudinin had promised to shave off his mustache if he didn't get (some percentage that I don't recall but that's higher than what he got).

But don't you follow it right now with all your public wanking 'pride parades'? And when you will get rid of Christianity you will have the Muslims buggering you to your ass content, you 'man' (white, I suppose).

That some Scots don’t know or regularly speak their native Gaelic language is indicative of Anglicization.
Some Scots?In the 2011 census of Scotland, 57,375 people (1.1% of the Scottish population aged over three years old) reported as able to speak Gaelic, 1,275 fewer than in 2001. The high...

Lowland Scots have never had Gaelic as their native language, they spoke a dialect of English. Lowland Scots are also seen as a Germanic people, sharing common ancestry with northern English.
Anyway I see Ukraine as comparable to Ireland. Russia has carved out their six counties with Crimea an...

what does any of that have to do with Israel attacking Hezbollah?
I don't see the US giving the Kurdish regions back to Assad but I really don't care about it beyond trolling Russophiles.
The bottom line is that Israel isn't attacking Hezbollah not because it can't or because it is afraid b...

The problem with democracy is that it isn't very democratic in practice.
I have thought a lot about this topic and here is my proposal for how to bring real democracy to the US:
1. Scrap the Presidency and the Senate.
2. Eliminate the ability of the Supreme Court and the judiciary to nul...

Look: we actually know Putin's personal views on politics.
He is a classical liberal -- meaning, he believes in private enterprise, small government, representative democracy, free trade within reasonable bounds and national borders without racialism.
His hobby is environmentalism. (The Joh...